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Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), commonly known as Salvador Dalí, was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres. Dalí
was
a skilled draftsman,
best
known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The
Persistence
of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí's
expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and
photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of
media. Dalí
attributed
his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my
passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to a self-styled "Arab lineage," claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors. Dalí
was
highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in
unusual and grandiose behavior, in order to draw attention to himself.
This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his
critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public
attention than his artwork. Salvador
Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, was born on May
11, 1904, at 8:45 a.m. GMT in the town of Figueres,
in
the Empordà region,
close
to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. Dalí's older
brother, also named Salvador (born October 12, 1901), had died of
gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on August 1, 1903. His father,
Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a middle class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinary
approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferrés, who
encouraged her son's artistic endeavors. When he was five,
Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents
that he was his brother's reincarnation, a concept which he came to
believe. Of his brother, Dalí
said, "…[we]
resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different
reflections." He "was probably a first
version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute." Dalí
also
had a sister, Ana María, who was three years younger. In 1949, she published a
book about her brother, Dalí
As
Seen By His Sister. His childhood friends
included future FC
Barcelona footballers Sagibarba and Josep
Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort of Cadaqués,
the
trio played football together. Dalí
attended drawing
school. In 1916, Dalí also discovered modern painting on a
summer vacation to Cadaqués with the family of Ramon
Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year,
Dalí's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings
in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the
Municipal Theater in Figueres in 1919. In
February 1921, Dalí's mother died of breast cancer. Dalí
was sixteen years old; he later said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I
had experienced in my life. I worshipped her… I could not resign myself
to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the
unavoidable blemishes of my soul." After her death,
Dalí's father married his deceased wife's sister. Dalí
did not resent this marriage, because he had a great love and respect
for his aunt. In 1922,
Dalí moved into the Residencia
de
Estudiantes (Students'
Residence)
in Madrid and studied at the Academia
de San Fernando (School of Fine Arts). A lean 1.72 m (5 ft.
7¾ in.) tall, Dalí already drew
attention as an eccentric and dandy.
He
wore long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings, and knee breeches in
the style of English aesthetes of the late 19th century. At the
Residencia, he became close friends with (among others) Pepín
Bello, Luis
Buñuel, and Federico
García
Lorca. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element
of mutual passion, but Dalí rejected
the erotic advances of the poet. However,
it was his paintings, in which he experimented with Cubism,
that
earned him the most attention from his fellow students. At the time of
these early works, Dalí probably did not completely
understand the Cubist movement. His only information on Cubist art came
from magazine articles and a catalog given to him by Pichot, since
there were no Cubist artists in Madrid at the time. In 1924, the still
unknown Salvador Dalí illustrated a book for the first
time. It was a publication of the Catalan poem "Les bruixes de Llers"
("The
Witches of Llers") by his friend and schoolmate, poet Carles
Fages
de Climent. Dalí also experimented with Dada,
which
influenced his work throughout his life. Dalí
was
expelled from the Academia in 1926, shortly before his final exams,
when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to
examine him. His mastery of painting
skills was evidenced by his flawlessly realistic Basket of Bread,
painted in 1926. That same year, he made his
first visit to Paris, where he met with Pablo
Picasso, whom the young Dalí revered. Picasso had already
heard favorable reports about Dalí from Joan
Miró. As he developed his own style over the next few years,
Dalí made a number of works heavily influenced by Picasso and
Miró. Some
trends in Dalí's work that would continue throughout his life
were already evident in the 1920s. Dalí devoured influences from
many styles of art, ranging from the most academically classic to the
most cutting-edge avant
garde. His classical influences
included Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco
de
Zurbaran, Vermeer,
and Velázquez. He used both classical and
modernist techniques, sometimes in separate works, and sometimes
combined. Exhibitions of his works in Barcelona attracted
much
attention along with mixtures of praise and puzzled debate from
critics. Dalí
grew
a flamboyant moustache,
influenced
by seventeenth century Spanish master painter Diego Velázquez. The moustache became an iconic trademark of his
appearance for the rest of his life. In 1929,
Dalí collaborated with surrealist film director Luis
Buñuel on
the short film Un
chien
andalou (An
Andalusian
Dog). His main contribution was to help Buñuel
write the script for the film. Dalí later claimed to have also
played a significant role in the filming of the project, but this is
not substantiated by contemporary accounts. Also, in August 1929,
Dalí met his muse, inspiration, and future wife Gala, born Elena Ivanovna
Diakonova. She was a Russian immigrant eleven years his senior,
who at that time was married to surrealist poet Paul
Éluard. In the same year, Dalí had important
professional exhibitions and officially joined the Surrealist group in
the Montparnasse quarter of Paris.
His
work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two
years. The Surrealists hailed what Dalí called the Paranoiac critical
method of accessing
the subconscious for
greater
artistic creativity. Meanwhile,
Dalí's
relationship with his father was close to rupture. Don
Salvador Dalí y Cusi strongly disapproved of his son's romance
with Gala, and saw his connection to the Surrealists as a bad influence
on his morals. The last straw was when Don Salvador read in a Barcelona
newspaper that his son had recently exhibited in Paris a drawing of the
"Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ", with a provocative inscription,
"Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait."
Outraged,
Don Salvador demanded that his son recant publicly. Dalí
refused, perhaps out of fear of expulsion from the Surrealist group,
and was violently thrown out of his paternal home on December 28, 1929.
His father told him that he would disinherit him, and that he should
never set foot in Cadaquès again. Dalí later claimed
that, in response, he handed his father a condom containing his own
sperm, saying, "Take that. I owe you nothing anymore!" The
following
summer, Dalí and Gala would rent a small fisherman's
cabin in a nearby bay at Port Lligat. He bought the place, and over the
years enlarged it, gradually building his much beloved villa by the sea. In 1931,
Dalí painted one of his most famous works, The
Persistence
of Memory, which introduced a
surrealistic image of soft, melting pocket watches. The general interpretation of the work is that the soft
watches are a rejection of the assumption that time is rigid or
deterministic. This idea is supported by other images in the work, such
as the wide expanding landscape, and the other limp watches, shown being devoured by insects. Dalí
and
Gala, having lived together since 1929, were married in 1934 in a
civil ceremony. They later remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958. Dalí
was
introduced to America by art dealer Julian Levy in 1934. The
exhibition in New York of Dalí's works, including Persistence of Memory, created
an immediate sensation. Social
Register listees
feted him at a specially organized "Dalí Ball." He showed up
wearing a glass case on his chest, which contained a brassiere. In that year, Dalí
and Gala also attended a masquerade party in New York, hosted for them
by heiress Caresse
Crosby. For their costumes, they dressed as the Lindbergh
baby and his kidnapper.
The
resulting uproar in the press was so great that Dalí
apologized. When he returned to Paris, the Surrealists confronted him
about his apology for a surrealist act. While the
majority of the Surrealist artists had become increasingly associated
with leftist politics, Dalí maintained an ambiguous position on
the subject of the proper relationship between politics and art.
Leading surrealist André
Breton accused Dalí of defending the "new" and "irrational"
in "the Hitler phenomenon," but Dalí quickly rejected this
claim, saying, "I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention." Dalí insisted that
surrealism could exist in an apolitical context and refused to
explicitly denounce fascism. Among
other
factors, this had landed him in trouble with his colleagues.
Later in 1934, Dalí was subjected to a "trial", in which he was
formally expelled from the Surrealist group. To this, Dalí
retorted, "I myself am surrealism." In 1936,
Dalí took part in the London
International
Surrealist Exhibition. His lecture, entitled Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques, was
delivered while wearing a deep-sea diving suit and helmet. He had arrived carrying a
billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds, and had to have
the helmet unscrewed as he gasped for breath. He commented that "I just
wanted to show that I was 'plunging deeply' into the human mind." Also in
1936, at the premiere screening of Joseph
Cornell's film Rose
Hobart at
Julian Levy's gallery in New York City, Dalí became famous for
another incident. Levy's program of short surrealist films was timed to
take place at the same time as the first surrealism exhibition at the Museum
of
Modern Art, featuring Dalí's work. Dalí was in the
audience at the screening, but halfway through the film, he knocked
over the projector in a rage. “My idea for a film is exactly that, and
I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made,” he
said. "I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if he had
stolen it." Other versions of Dalí's accusation tend to the more
poetic: "He stole it from my subconscious!" or even "He stole my
dreams!" At this
stage, Dalí's main patron in London was the very wealthy Edward
James. He had helped Dalí emerge into the art world by
purchasing many works and by supporting him financially for two years.
They became good friends, and James is featured in Dalí's
painting Swans
Reflecting
Elephants. They also collaborated on two of the most
enduring icons of the Surrealist movement:
the Lobster Telephone and the Mae
West
Lips Sofa. In 1939,
Breton coined the derogatory nickname "Avida Dollars", an anagram for Salvador Dalí,
and
a phonetic rendering of the French avide à dollars,
which may be translated as "eager for dollars". This was a derisive
reference to the increasing commercialization of Dalí's work,
and the perception that Dalí sought self-aggrandizement through
fame and fortune. Some surrealists henceforth spoke of Dalí in
the past tense, as if he were dead. The
Surrealist
movement and various members thereof (such as Ted
Joans) would continue to issue extremely harsh polemics against
Dalí until the time of his death and beyond. In 1940,
as World
War
II started in
Europe, Dalí and Gala moved to the United States, where they
lived for eight years. After the move, Dalí returned to the
practice of Catholicism. "During this period, Dalí never stopped
writing," wrote Robert and Nicolas Descharnes. In 1941,
Dalí drafted a film scenario for Jean
Gabin called Moontide. In 1942,
he published his autobiography, The
Secret
Life of Salvador Dalí. He wrote catalogs for his
exhibitions, such as that at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1943.
Therein he expounded, "Surrealism will at least have served to give
experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at automatizations
have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system. ... Today's
laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in
the psychological signification of the current use of the college." He
also wrote a novel, published in 1944, about a fashion salon for
automobiles. This resulted in a drawing by Edwin Cox in The
Miami
Herald, depicting Dalí dressing an automobile in
an evening gown. Also in The
Secret
Life, Dalí suggested that he had split with
Buñuel because the latter was a Communist and an atheist.
Buñuel
was fired (or resigned) from MOMA, supposedly after Cardinal
Spellman of New
York went to see Iris
Barry, head of the film department at MOMA. Buñuel then went
back to Hollywood where he worked in the dubbing department of Warner
Brothers from 1942
to 1946. In his 1982 autobiography Mon
Dernier
soupir (English
translation My Last
Sigh, published
1983), Buñuel wrote that, over the years, he rejected
Dalí's attempts at reconciliation. An Italian friar,
Gabriele
Maria Berardi, claimed to have performed an exorcism on Dalí while he was
in France in 1947. In 2005, a sculpture of
Christ on the Cross was discovered in the friar's estate. It had been
claimed that Dalí gave this work to his exorcist out of
gratitude, and two Spanish art experts
confirmed that there were adequate stylistic reasons to believe the
sculpture was made by Dalí. Starting
in 1949, Dalí spent his remaining years back in his beloved
Catalonia. The fact that he chose to live in Spain while it was ruled
by Franco drew criticism from progressives and from many other artists. As such, it is probable
that the common dismissal of Dalí's later works by some
Surrealists and art critics was related partially to politics rather
than to the artistic merit of the works themselves. In 1959, André
Breton organized an
exhibit called Homage
to
Surrealism, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Surrealism,
which contained works by Dalí, Joan
Miró, Enrique
Tábara, and Eugenio
Granell. Breton vehemently fought against the inclusion of
Dalí's Sistine Madonna in the
International Surrealism Exhibition in New York the following year. Late in
his career, Dalí did not confine himself to painting, but
experimented with many unusual or novel media and processes: he made bulletist works and was among the first
artists to employ holography in an artistic manner. Several of his works
incorporate optical illusions. In his later years, young artists such as Andy
Warhol proclaimed
Dalí an important influence on pop
art. Dalí also had a keen
interest in natural science and mathematics. This is manifested in
several of his paintings, notably in the 1950s, in which he painted his
subjects as composed of rhinoceros horns. According to Dalí, the
rhinoceros horn signifies divine geometry because it grows in a
logarithmic spiral. He also linked the rhinoceros to themes of chastity
and to the Virgin Mary. Dalí was also
fascinated by DNA and the hypercube (a 4-dimensional cube); an
unfolding of a hypercube is featured in the painting Crucifixion
(Corpus Hypercubus). Dalí's
post-World
War II period bore the hallmarks of technical virtuosity and
an interest in optical illusions, science, and religion. He became an
increasingly devout Catholic, while at the same time he had been
inspired by the shock of Hiroshima and the dawning of the "atomic age".
Therefore Dalí labeled this period "Nuclear Mysticism."
In
paintings such as "The Madonna of Port-Lligat" (first version) (1949)
and "Corpus Hypercubus" (1954), Dalí sought to synthesize
Christian iconography with images of material
disintegration inspired by nuclear physics. "Nuclear Mysticism"
included such notable pieces as "La
Gare
de Perpignan" (1965) and "Hallucinogenic Toreador" (1968 – 70).
In 1960, Dalí began work on the Dalí
Theatre
and Museum in
his home town of Figueres;
it
was his largest single project and the main focus of his energy
through 1974. He continued to make additions through the mid-1980s. In 1968,
Dalí filmed a television advertisement for Lanvin chocolates, and in 1969, he designed the Chupa
Chups logo. Also in
1969, he was responsible for creating the advertising aspect of the 1969
Eurovision
Song Contest and
created a large metal sculpture that stood on the stage at the Teatro
Real in Madrid. In the
television programme Dirty
Dalì:
A Private View broadcast
on Channel
4 on June 3, 2007,
art critic Brian
Sewell described
his acquaintance with Dalí in the late 1960s, which included
lying down in the fetal position without trousers in the armpit of a
figure of Christ and masturbating for Dalí, who pretended to
take photos while fumbling in his own trousers. In 1980,
Dalí's health took a catastrophic turn. His near-senile wife, Gala, allegedly had
been dosing him with a dangerous cocktail of unprescribed medicine that
damaged his nervous system, thus causing an untimely end to his
artistic capacity. At 76 years old, Dalí was a wreck, and his
right hand trembled terribly, with Parkinson-like symptoms. In 1982, King
Juan
Carlos bestowed
on Dalí the title of Marqués
de
Dalí de Púbol (English:
Marquis
of Dalí de Púbol) in the nobility
of
Spain, thereby referring to Púbol,
the
place where he lived. The title was in first instance hereditary,
but on request of Dalí changed for life only in 1983. To show his gratitude for
this, Dalí later gave the king a drawing (Head of Europa,
which would turn out to be Dalí's final drawing) after the king
visited him on his deathbed. Gala
died
on June 10, 1982. After Gala's death, Dalí lost much of his will
to live. He deliberately dehydrated himself, possibly as a suicide
attempt, or possibly in an attempt to put himself into a state of
suspended animation as he had read that some microorganisms could do. He moved from
Figueres to the castle
in
Púbol, which he had bought for Gala and was the site of
her death. In 1984, a fire broke out in his bedroom under unclear
circumstances. It was possibly a suicide attempt by Dalí, or
possibly simple negligence by his staff. In any case, Dalí
was rescued and returned to Figueres, where a group of his friends,
patrons, and fellow artists saw to it that he was comfortable living in
his Theater-Museum in his final years. There
have been allegations that Dalí was forced by his guardians to
sign blank canvases that would later, even after his death, be used in
forgeries and sold as originals. As a result, art dealers
tend to be wary of late works attributed to Dalí. In
November 1988, Dalí entered the hospital with heart failure, and
on December 5, 1988 was visited by King Juan
Carlos, who confessed that he had always been a serious devotee of
Dalí. On
January 23, 1989, while his favorite record of Tristan
and
Isolde played,
he died of heart failure at Figueres at the age of 84, and, coming full
circle, is buried in the crypt of his Teatro
Museo in
Figueres.
The location is across the street from the church of Sant Pere, where
he had his baptism, first communion, and funeral, and is three blocks
from the house where he was born. The
Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation currently serves as his official
estate. The U.S. copyright
representative for the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation is the Artists
Rights
Society. In 2002, the Society made
the news when they asked Google to
remove
a customized version of its logo put up to commemorate
Dalí, alleging that portions of specific artworks under their
protection had been used without permission. Google complied with the
request, but denied that there was any copyright violation. Dalí
employed
extensive symbolism in his work. For instance, the hallmark
"soft watches" that first appear in The
Persistence
of Memory suggest Einstein's
theory
that time
is
relative and not
fixed. The idea for clocks
functioning symbolically in this way came to Dalí when he was
staring at a runny piece of Camembert
cheese on a hot day
in August. The
elephant is also a recurring image in Dalí's works. It first
appeared in his 1944 work Dream
Caused
by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before
Awakening. The elephants, inspired by Gian
Lorenzo
Bernini's sculpture base in Rome of an elephant
carrying
an ancient obelisk, are
portrayed "with long,
multijointed, almost invisible legs of desire" along
with
obelisks on their backs. Coupled with the image of their brittle legs,
these encumbrances, noted for their phallic overtones, create a
sense of phantom reality. "The elephant is a distortion in space," one
analysis explains, "its spindly legs contrasting the idea of
weightlessness with structure." "I am painting pictures
which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness,
without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that
inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them
honestly." — Salvador Dalí, in Dawn Ades, Dalí and
Surrealism. The egg is another common Dalíesque image. He connects the egg to the
prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love; it appears in The
Great
Masturbator and The
Metamorphosis
of Narcissus. Various animals appear throughout
his work as well: ants point to death, decay, and immense sexual
desire; the snail is connected to the human head (he saw a snail on a
bicycle outside Freud's house when he first met Sigmund
Freud); and locusts are a symbol of waste and fear. Dalí
was
a versatile artist. Some of his more popular works are sculptures
and other objects, and he is also noted for his contributions to theatre, fashion, and photography, among other areas. Two of
the most popular objects of the surrealist movement were Lobster
Telephone and Mae
West
Lips Sofa, completed by Dalí in 1936 and 1937,
respectively. Surrealist artist and patron Edward
James commissioned both of these pieces from Dalí; James inherited a large English
estate in West
Dean, West
Sussex when he was
five and was one of the foremost supporters of the surrealists in the
1930s. "Lobsters and telephones
had strong sexual connotations for [Dalí]," according to the
display caption for the Lobster
Telephone at the Tate
Gallery, "and he drew a close analogy between food and sex." The telephone was
functional, and James purchased four of them from Dalí to
replace the phones in his retreat home. One now appears at the Tate
Gallery; the second can be found at the German Telephone Museum in Frankfurt;
the
third belongs to the Edward James Foundation; and the fourth is at
the National
Gallery
of Australia. The wood
and satin Mae West
Lips Sofa was
shaped after the lips of actress Mae
West, whom Dalí apparently found fascinating. West was previously the
subject of Dalí's 1935 painting The Face of Mae West. Mae West Lips Sofa currently resides at the
Brighton and Hove Museum in England. Between
1941 and 1970, Dalí created an ensemble of 39 jewels. The jewels
are intricate, and some contain moving parts. The most famous jewel,
"The Royal Heart," is made of gold and is encrusted with 46 rubies, 42
diamonds, and four emeralds and is created in such a way that the
center "beats" much like a real heart. Dalí himself commented
that "Without an audience, without the presence of spectators, these
jewels would not fulfill the function for which they came into being.
The viewer, then, is the ultimate artist." (Dalí, 1959.) The
"Dalí — Joies" ("The Jewels of Dalí") collection can be
seen at the Dalí Theater Museum in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain,
where it is on permanent exhibition. In
theatre, Dalí constructed the scenery for García Lorca's
1927 romantic play Mariana
Pineda. For Bacchanale (1939), a ballet based on and set to the music of Richard
Wagner's 1845 opera Tannhäuser,
Dalí
provided both the set design and the libretto. Bacchanale was followed by set designs
for Labyrinth in 1941 and The Three-Cornered Hat in 1949. Dalí
became
intensely interested in film when he was young, going to the
theatre most Sundays. He was part of the era where silent films were
being viewed and drawing on the medium of film became popular. He
believed there were two dimensions to the theories of film and cinema:
"things themselves" — the facts that are presented in the world of the
camera, and "photographic imagination" — the way the camera shows the
picture and how creative or imaginative it looks. Dalí was active in
front of and behind the scenes in the film world. He created pieces of
artwork such as Destino,
on
which he collaborated with Walt Disney. He is also credited as
cocreator of Luis Buñuel's surrealist film Un
Chien
Andalou, a 17-minute French art film cowritten with Luis
Buñuel that is widely remembered for its graphic opening scene
simulating the slashing of a human eyeball with a razor.
This
film is what Dalí is known for in the independent film world. Un Chien
Andalou was
Dalí's way of creating his dreamlike qualities in the real
world. Images would change and scenes would switch, leading the viewer
in a completely different direction from the one they were previously
viewing. The second film he produced with Buñuel was entitled L’age
d’or, and it was performed at Studio 28 in Paris in 1930. L’age d’or was "banned for years after
fascist and anti-Semitic groups staged a stink bomb and ink-throwing
riot in the Paris theater where it was shown." Although
negative aspects of society were being thrown into the life of
Dalí and obviously
affecting the success of his artwork, it did not hold him back from
expressing his own ideas and beliefs in his art. Both of these films,
Un Chien Andalou and L’age d’or, have had a tremendous impact on the
independent surrealist film movement. "If Un Chien Andalou stands as
the supreme record of Surrealism's adventures into the realm of the
unconscious, then L'Âge d'or is perhaps the most trenchant and
implacable expression of its revolutionary intent." Dalí
also
worked with other famous filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock. The
most well known of his film projects is probably the dream sequence in Alfred
Hitchcock's Spellbound,
which
heavily delves into themes of psychoanalysis. Hitchcock needed a
dreamlike quality to his movie, which dealt with the idea that a
repressed experience can directly trigger a neurosis, and he knew that
Dalí's work would help create the atmosphere he wanted in his
film. He also worked on a documentary called Chaos and Creation,
which has a lot of artistic references thrown into it to help one see
what Dalí's vision of art really is. He also worked on Disney cartoon production Destino. Completed
in 2003 by Baker Bloodworth and Roy
Disney,
it contains dreamlike images of strange figures flying and
walking about. It is based on Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez'
song entitled "Destino." When Disney hired Dalí to help produce
Destino in 1946, they were not prepared for the work they had ahead of
themselves. For eight months, they continuously animated until their
efforts had to come to a stop when they realized they were in financial
trouble. They had no more money to finish the production of the
animated movie; however, it was eventually finished and shown in
various film festivals. The movie consists of Dalí's artwork
interacting with Disney's classic princesslike character animation.
Dalí completed only one other film in his lifetime, Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1975), in which he narrated a story about an expedition in
search of giant hallucinogenic mushrooms. The imagery was based on
microscopic uric acid stains on the brass band of a ballpoint pen on
which Dalí had been urinating for several weeks. Dalí
built
a repertoire in the fashion and photography industries as well.
In fashion, his cooperation with Italian fashion designer Elsa
Schiaparelli is
well-known, where Dalí was hired by Schiaparelli to produce a
white dress with a lobster print. Other designs Dalí made for
her include a shoe-shaped hat and a pink belt with lips for a buckle.
He was also involved in creating textile designs and perfume bottles.
With Christian
Dior in 1950,
Dalí created a special "costume for the year 2045." Photographers
with
whom he collaborated include Man
Ray, Brassaï, Cecil
Beaton, and Philippe
Halsman. With Man
Ray and Brassaï, Dalí photographed nature; with the others,
he explored a range of obscure topics, including (with Halsman) the Dalí Atomica series (1948) — inspired by
his painting Leda
Atomica — which in one photograph depicts "a painter's easel, three
cats, a bucket of water, and Dalí himself floating in the air." References
to
Dalí in the context of science are made in terms of his
fascination with the paradigm shift that accompanied the birth of quantum mechanics in the
twentieth century. Inspired by Werner
Heisenberg's Uncertainty
Principle, in 1958 he wrote in his "Anti-Matter Manifesto": "In the
Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior
world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the
exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of
psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg." In this
respect, The
Disintegration
of the Persistence of Memory, which appeared in
1954, in hearkening back to The
Persistence of Memory, and in portraying that painting in
fragmentation and disintegration summarizes Dalí's
acknowledgment of the new science. Architectural
achievements
include his Port Lligat house near Cadaqués as well
as the Dream of Venus surrealist pavilion at the
1939 World's Fair, which contained within it a number of unusual sculptures and
statues. His literary works include The
Secret
Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), Diary of a Genius (1952 – 63), and Oui: The
Paranoid-Critical Revolution (1927 – 33).
The
artist worked extensively in the graphic arts, producing many
etchings and lithographs. While his early work in printmaking is equal
in quality to his important paintings as he grew older, he would sell
the rights to images but not be involved in the print production
itself. In addition, a large number of unauthorized fakes were produced
in the eighties and nineties, thus further confusing the Dalí
print market. One of
Dalí's most unorthodox artistic creations may have been an
entire person. At a French nightclub in 1965, Dalí met Amanda
Lear, a fashion model then known as Peki D'Oslo. Lear became his
protégé and muse, writing about their affair
in the authorized biography My
Life
With Dalí (1986). Transfixed by the mannish,
larger-than-life Lear, Dalí masterminded her successful
transition from modeling to the music world, advising her on
self-presentation and helping spin mysterious stories about her origin
as she took the disco-art scene by storm. According to Lear, she and
Dalí were united in a "spiritual marriage" on a deserted
mountaintop. Referred to as Dalí's "Frankenstein," some believe Lear's name is
a pun on the French "L'Amant Dalí," or Lover of Dalí.
Lear took the place of an earlier muse, Ultra
Violet
(Isabelle Collin Dufresne), who had left Dalí's side
to join The
Factory of Andy
Warhol. Salvador
Dalí's politics played a significant role in his emergence as an
artist. In his youth, he embraced both anarchism and communism, though
his writings account anecdotes of making radical political
statements more to shock listeners than from any deep conviction. This
was in keeping with Dalí's allegiance to the Dada movement. As he
grew older his political allegiances changed, especially as the
Surrealist movement went through transformations under the leadership of Trotskyist André
Breton, who is said to have called Dalí in for questioning
on his politics. In his 1970 book Dalí
by
Dalí, Dalí was declaring himself an anarchist and monarchist. With the
outbreak of the Spanish
Civil
War, Dalí fled from fighting and refused to align
himself with any group. Likewise, after World
War
II, George
Orwell criticized
Dalí for "scuttling off like a rat as soon as France is in
danger" after Dalí prospered there for years: "When the European
War approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which
has good cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if danger
comes too near." In a notable 1944 review of Dalí's autobiography, George
Orwell wrote, "One
ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts
that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being." After his
return to Catalonia after World War II,
Dalí became closer to the authoritarian Franco regime. Some of
Dalí's statements supported the Franco regime, congratulating
Franco for his actions aimed "at clearing Spain of destructive forces." Dalí, having
returned to the Catholic faith and becoming increasingly religious as
time went on, may have been referring to the Communists, Socialists,
and anarchists who had killed
almost
7,000 priests and nuns during
the
Spanish Civil War. Dalí sent telegrams
to Franco, praising him for signing death warrants for prisoners. He even met Franco
personally and painted a portrait of
Franco's granddaughter. He also
once sent a telegram praising the Conducător,
Romanian
Communist leader Nicolae
Ceauşescu, for his adoption of a scepter as part of his regalia. The
Romanian daily newspaper Scînteia published it, without
suspecting its mocking aspect. One of Dalí's few possible bits
of open disobedience was his continued praise of Federico
García
Lorca even
in the years when Lorca's works were banned. Dalí,
a
colorful and imposing presence in his ever-present long cape, walking
stick, haughty expression, and upturned waxed mustache, was famous for
having said that "every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme
pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí." The entertainer Cher and her husband Sonny
Bono, when young, came to a party at Dalí's expensive
residence in New York's Plaza Hotel and were
startled when Cher sat down on an oddly shaped sexual vibrator left in
an easy chair. When signing autographs for fans, Dalí would
always keep their pens. When interviewed by Mike
Wallace on his 60
Minutes television
show,
Dalí kept referring to himself in the third person, and
told the startled Mr. Wallace matter-of-factly that "Dalí is
immortal and will not die." During another television appearance, on the Tonight
Show, Dalí carried with him a leather rhinoceros and
refused to sit upon anything else. |